Senior Azure AI Foundry Engineer

Job Title: Azure AI Foundry Engineer

Location: Lansing/Detroit, Michigan (Hybrid)

Client: Cognizant

Employment Type: W2

Experience: 8+ Years

Job Description:

We are seeking an experienced Azure AI Foundry Engineer to design, develop, and deploy enterprise-grade generative AI solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform. The ideal candidate should have strong experience with Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, AI agents, Python, and cloud-native application development.

Key Responsibilities

Design and develop generative AI applications using Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI.
Build Retrieval-Augmented Generation solutions using Azure AI Search, vector databases, embeddings, and enterprise data sources.

Develop AI agents capable of interacting with APIs, databases, documents, and other business systems.

Design prompt workflows, system instructions, tool-calling processes, and multi-step agent workflows.

Develop backend AI services and APIs using Python, FastAPI, Flask, or similar frameworks.
Integrate structured and unstructured data from Azure Data Lake, Blob Storage, SQL databases, SharePoint, and enterprise applications.

Implement document ingestion, chunking, embedding, indexing, retrieval, and response-generation pipelines.

Evaluate AI applications for response accuracy, relevance, groundedness, safety, latency, and overall performance.

Implement responsible AI controls, content filtering, prompt-injection protection, access controls, and data-security standards.

Monitor AI applications using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, logging, tracing, and Foundry observability capabilities.

Deploy and manage AI solutions using Azure Functions, Azure App Service, Azure Container Apps, AKS, or similar Azure services.

Build automated CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.

Collaborate with data engineers, data scientists, architects, business analysts, and product teams.

Troubleshoot issues related to model responses, data retrieval, integrations, application performance, and cloud deployment.

Prepare technical design documents, architecture diagrams, deployment guides, and operational documentation.

Required Skills

6+ years of overall software engineering, data engineering, cloud, or AI development experience.
Strong hands-on experience with Azure AI Foundry or Microsoft Foundry.

Experience with Azure OpenAI models, embeddings, chat completions, and model deployments.
Strong experience developing RAG-based applications.

Hands-on experience with Azure AI Search, vector search, semantic search, and hybrid search.
Strong programming experience with Python.

Experience developing REST APIs using FastAPI, Flask, or similar frameworks.

Experience with prompt engineering, function calling, tool calling, and AI agent development.
Understanding of LLM evaluation, hallucination reduction, groundedness, responsible AI, and content safety.

Experience with Azure services such as Blob Storage, Data Lake, Key Vault, Functions, App Service, Container Apps, AKS, and Application Insights.

Experience working with SQL, NoSQL, document databases, or vector databases.

Experience with Git, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Docker, and CI/CD processes.